What's In A Name?
In Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Juliet says to Romeo:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
GoDaddy doesn't agree with Juliet. The company is no stranger to filing patent applications and owns scores of published applications and issued patents. Some of these patent applications are directed to a market for domain names. As Domain Name Wire reports, two such applications published today:
- Patent Publication No. 20090171823 claims " A method comprising the step of underwriting a sale of shares of equity in a Domain Name."
- Patent Publication No. 20090171678 claims "A method comprising the step of protecting a Domain Name from an undesired transfer of ownership during a sale of shares of equity in the Domain Name."
If you know anything about patents or have read my prior blog entry on breadth, you know that these are quite broad claims. A strategy commonly employed by savvy patent applicants is to initially file broad claims and then narrow them during prosecution of the patent application in view of prior art the patent examiner or the applicant identify. Doing so can result in broader coverage than starting with narrow claims and then attempting to broaden them during prosecution.
The names Capulet and Montague may have smelled similarly sweetly to Juliet, but to the owners of some desirable domain names that can fetch a princely sum, some domain names smell more sweetly than others.
